Fanciful indicia can be printed on clothing or any other suitable substrate. The indicia is typically printed on an article or substrate through a screen. The screen has interstices which correspond to the indicia to be printed. If it is desired to print using several colors, a series of screens is used, each screen corresponding to one of the particular colors.
Some of the inks used to print the indicia are liquid-based, typically water or plastisol. Other inks are also used, such as those containing solvents and those which are cured using ultraviolet light. These types of inks are conventional in the art. Methods for printing indicia using these inks are also well-known in the art. Typical in the industry is use of a print head comprising a flood bar and a squeegee for printing. The flood bar floods the screen with ink as the print head moves in a first direction towards the front of the screen, and the squeegee squeezes the ink through the interstices in the screen and onto the article to be printed as the print head moves in a second direction towards the rear of the screen. There are several different types of printing press, including a clam shell-type, a turret-type, and others. Some applications do not use a squeegee.
During printing, there is a tendency for ink to accumulate at one end of the screen. To remedy this, an operator of the press must stop operation of the printing press to manually scrape the accumulated ink back onto the printing area of the screen. This is time-consuming and results in down time in the operation of the machine, resulting in lost productivity.
A need has existed for a device which eliminates the manual scraping of the ink onto the printing area of the screen. The present invention eliminates the need for the operator to stop the machine and manually recover ink accumulated at the end of the screen, thereby increasing productivity and reducing down time.